Step 8 Now that the centre is removed we can get on with painting all the thousands of elements randomly, with a set of colours based on a swatch. Here I am using a palette of purple, pink, red, orange and yellow.

Step 9 Doing this by hand would take hours or even days, but using Illustrator’s scripting capabilities we can reduce this to mere minutes. Select all the objects and then select File > Scripting > Other Script and load Random_Fill_With_Swatch_Time_Curve.jsx. If you have a high-end desktop this will take a few minutes to execute. However, if you are running this on a laptop, simply select just a few objects at a time and run the script on each in turn to complete the entire set of objects. To learn how this script works, see Follow the script (on page 7 of this tutorial). To finish off the design, select all and give it a 0.5pt white border line – and there you have it.

Step 10 We now want to turn this piece of art into an A2 poster print. Open InDesign CS5 and create a new document with the dimensions of our output size – in our case 360 (width) x 554 (depth), ready to be produced in sheets and cut to size at our print house. Leave the other settings as they are.